I need help please!!!! Our school is doing a fall festival for Halloween. In the past we did haunted houses, etc.. This year we have to stay with the Fall theme. Any ideas would be appreciated. Our children do come to school with their costumes.

There are lots of different themes you could use. A Pumkin Festival would be fun, the kids could decorate pumpkins (either real or paper), have a pumpkin "hunt and find" (sort of like an Easter egg hunt, but with miniture pumpkins), and serve treats like pumpkin bread or muffins.

You could also do a broader Harvest Festival theme that incorporates other traditional activites like apple bobbing, making cereal necklaces, and crafting corn dolls.

here are some sites with more ideas:
Harvest Party Ideas - Halloween Alternatives
Kids' Harvest Party Games and Ideas

Dear jalgieri ,

Fall is such a great time for a carnival . If you choose a harvest theme like down on the farm it is still warm enough to have a small petting zoo put side . You can use apples tied to a string and let the kids try to bite them off if you prefer not to bob for apples . You can do great things with pumpkins make a few pumpkins to set around carve them and make scare crows and then you can roast the pumpkin seeds and sell bags of them . The games are unlimited anything from pin the nose on the scare crow to pumpkin bowling (at our school we use the blow up pumpkins and a small ball but you can do it with real pumpkins . You can do a county fair judging pies ,jelly ,or apple butter and you can have a blue ribbon contest this is a lot of fun parents and kids both can make items . Hay rides are a great thing also kids love them .

You may want to get a few books like taste of home or womans day they have a lot of great fall ideas .

Best of luck and I am sure everyone will have a great ime no matter what theme you go with !

We have a Fall Fun Festival for our pre-school every year in which we have activity stations around the gym. Kids decorate gift bags, bat hats, do a simple obstacle course, "bob" for apples using large spoons, bowl and sing a song with our Music/Movement teacher. At the end, the kids get to go trick or trunking! our PTO supplies the goodies and teachers and staff open their trunks for the kids to visit.